The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock by Edward White (an ebook reader txt) 📗

in Central Europe—he explained that his recent work had been fantastical because his desire to show “violent things” could be done only through heightened fiction. The previous decade or so had been a febrile time; Hitchcock had been motivated to capture the “forcefulness and violence” of that atmosphere. When the General Strike of 1926 put tanks on the streets of London, Hitchcock apparently tried to make a film about it. He wanted to re-create “fistfights between strikers and undergraduates, pickets, and all the authentic drama,” but producers told him that such explicitness would never make it past the censors. Much the same thing happened when filming The Man Who Knew Too Much. When the Home Office learned of Hitchcock’s plans to film a siege at the film’s climax, Hitchcock was told he could not show the militia on the streets and ordinary houses “surrounded by machine guns. All that I was allowed to do was depict the policemen being handed rifles and shown how to use them.”

In September 1939, Britain declared war on Nazi Germany, by which time Hitchcock and family had begun a new life in Hollywood. From the outbreak of hostilities, Hitchcock felt compelled to lend his talents to the war effort. “I was both overweight and overage for military service. I knew that if I did nothing I’d regret it for the rest of my life.” On and off for five years, he worked quietly but seriously on several projects designed to support the cause of US intervention and raise the morale of those back home in Britain. Among a community of Brits in Hollywood, he was heavily involved in the development of a propaganda film called Forever and a Day (begun in early 1940, eventually completed in 1943), and reedited two docudramas for the American market, Men of the Lightship (1940) and Target for Tonight (1941), the former about the Nazi bombardment of British installations in the North Sea, the latter about British bombing raids of Germany. American distributors had refused to handle the films as originally cut, considering them far too parochial and pedestrian for American audiences. Displaying his native understanding of popular taste, Hitchcock made both snappier, and less insularly British, and, according to one historian, they became the most profitable of all government-sponsored war films released within the first four years of the conflict. Between December 1943 and February 1944, he then wrote, produced, directed, and edited two French-language films, Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache, both in praise of the French Resistance. At only twenty-six minutes long, and made on a tiny budget, Bon Voyage has a certain similarity to the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes, in that it is littered with false memories and mistaken identities, lots of tightly framed close-ups, and not an ounce of narrative fat. Contrary to later reports, the film was shown to the French public, and appears to have been well received. Aventure Malgache was a different story. “We realized that the Free French were very divided against one another,” Hitchcock explained, and it was these “inner conflicts” around which he decided to spin the film. With nuanced characters and moral gray areas, the atmosphere was pure Hitchcock—but bad propaganda. Failing to tell a simple story about the heroic French people and the dastardly enemy, the film was suppressed for decades.

As the war rolled toward its end, Hitchcock was approached by his friend, the British producer Sidney Bernstein, to help shape the final reels of a film Bernstein was making for the British Ministry of Information, in which there would be no space for ambiguity or playfulness: a documentary about what had taken place inside the Nazi concentration camps. In June 1945, Hitchcock checked in at Claridge’s hotel in London, ready to host several weeks of meetings with two writers, Richard Crossman and Colin Wills, and an editor named Peter Tanner, with whom he crafted the most damning testimony of Nazi atrocities, based on hours of raw footage from Dachau and Buchenwald. Hitchcock’s involvement in the film was known about during his lifetime, but he refused to discuss it in any depth.

Originally designed to educate the public about the extent of the Third Reich’s crimes, the film was ultimately shelved, unfinished. So horrific was its content that the governments of the United States, Britain, and France agreed that its impact on public sentiment may have detracted from the aims of the Marshall Plan. Better to build a new Germany, it was felt, than wallow in the ashes of the old one. Some of the footage was used as evidence at the Nuremberg trials, but after that the film was removed from public sight. In 1985, five years after Hitchcock’s death, it briefly reemerged when PBS screened the unfinished portions of it in the documentary Frontline: Memory of the Camps. Only in 2014 was the film finally completed, restored, and screened, when it played at the Berlin Film Festival under the original and appropriately sober title, German Concentration Camps Factual Survey.

Given the glee with which Hitchcock put people’s lives in danger on screen, simply, as he claimed, to thrill his audience, recruiting him to be the guiding hand on a serious testament to genocidal depravity might seem odd. But Sidney Bernstein, who had known Hitchcock since 1925, “thought he, a brilliant man, would have some ideas how we could tie it all together, and he had.” Hitchcock was taken by the contrast of the horrifying footage from the camps and that of the tranquil, bucolic towns in the vicinity. He suggested they use simple maps to illustrate how ordinary life ran along with human slaughter on its doorstep. Peter Tanner, the film’s editor, credited Hitchcock’s understanding of the emotional impact of film technique as having a real bearing on his work. Hitchcock, said Tanner, “was very careful to try to get material which could not possibly be seen to be faked in any way,” making extensive use of long takes that could be displayed without cuts. Likewise, Hitchcock also